Farine

Meet the Baker: Mark Stambler

Serious home bakers, meet your new hero! Mark Stambler is the LA resident and fellow artisan whose passion for bread baking and sense of fair play led the California Legislature to adopt the California Homemade Food Act in 2012. Thanks to his relentless statewide efforts, California “cottage food operators” no longer need a commercial license to sell what they make at home. There are constraints, of course. For instance Mark cannot use the beautiful wood-fired oven he built in his backyard in Los Feliz to bake any bread he sells through a store or a CSA. He must use the stove in his home kitchen.

But he still uses his outdoor oven when he bakes for family and friends, and I was lucky enough to see him operate it on the day I visited. Whether baked in the backyard or in the kitchen, Mark’s bread is made with the same simple ingredients: organic white flour, organic grains which he mills himself into whole-grain flour, sea salt and distilled water. He currently bakes about twenty loaves a week: miche, levain and rye. The miches are 70% fresh whole grains (hard red winter wheat, hard red spring wheat, spelt and rye), the levain 30%. The rye is 40% whole rye and 60% wheat. All are leavened with natural starters, all gorgeously rustic, healthful and flavorful. Just the kind of bread I can never get enough of!

I followed Mark with my notebook and pen as he unwrapped tray after tray of proofed loaves and carried them outside to his oven. He was in a bit of a rush because the oven had reached the perfect temperature (550°F/288°C near the dome, closer to 500°F/260°C near the sole) and the bread was clearly ready to bake. But I walk fast and scribble even faster, and he didn’t appear to mind my shadowing him back and forth.
As seems to be the case with so many people I have met in the bread world since I began this series, Mark didn’t start out to be a baker. He actually still makes his living as a consultant for non-profit organizations. He attributes his lifelong love affair with bread to the fact that he became a vegetarian when he was still in high school. His mom supported his decision as long as it didn’t entail her cooking two sets of meals a day, one for him and one for the rest of the family. So he ate whatever he could and soon became bored with his diet. Once in college, he decided to start cooking for himself, using The Vegetarian Epicure, by Anna Thomas. The book offered a recipe for French bread.

Mark decided to give baking bread a try. The rest is history. The Vegetarian Epicure was followed by Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking whose chapter on baking provided him with years of inspiration and learning. He even built himself the simulated baker’s oven Julia advocates for serious home bakers. From there he moved on to Carol Fields’ The Italian Baker and finally decided to focus on traditional French country bread. He started grinding his own flour, took a class with Jeffrey Hamelman, discovered Gérard Rubaud (through this blog, I am delighted to say) and now relies on his own levain à la Gérard. Along the way he also built an Alan Scott oven in his backyard with the help of a friend (it took them four months, working on weekends, figuring out each step of the way)…

…won a couple of blue ribbons for his bread (LA County Fair, 2005; California State Fair, 2006)…

…and finally realized that he might as well bake to sell since he now had an excellent and roomy oven. By then it was 2008, and Mark had already acquired quite a reputation in his neighborhood as a homebaker. He didn’t have to go far to find outlets for his bread: the cheese stores in nearby Silver Lake and Echo Park were only too happy to carry it. The word spread. Food bloggers found out. More people asked for his bread. He started selling to a CSA. Soon he was baking fifty to sixty loaves a week and working non-stop mixing, proofing, shaping and baking Thursdays through Sundays. “Informal apprentices” came every week to watch and learn.
Alerted by the online buzz, the Los Angeles Times expressed an interest. Mark explained to the reporter that the stores which carried his bread were not authorized to sell homemade food products; he didn’t want to get the owners in trouble. If the reporter went ahead with the article, she couldn’t say where his bread was to be found. A week before the story ran, she called saying they had to let the people know where to get his bread: “We’ve done this before. Don’t worry!”
The story was featured in the June 2, 2011 print edition of the paper. The next day, inspectors from the LA County Health Department descended on the stores. As it happened, Mark’s bread was already sold out in both places and the inspectors didn’t find any. But at one store they made the owners throw away cheeses which were kept at room temperature for ripening and at the other, they started going methodically through the inventory. Seething, one owner started a huge battle with the Health Department. Whatever the outcome, Mark knew he could no longer sell his bread.

Crushed for a couple of days, Mark quickly realized it was in his best interest to make friends with the Health Department. So he called them up, innocently asking about baking bread at home and whether it was legal to sell homemade food in California. There was a long pause on the phone… and then the answer came: “Is this Mark Stambler? What were you thinking?!”, the Health Department inspector asked. He then said that while it was illegal for Mark to sell bread he baked at home, it would probably be fine for him to sell wholesale bread he baked at a certified bakery or catering kitchen. Mark started asking local caterers and bakeries if he could use their ovens, and when two said “yes”, he double-checked with the Department to make sure it would indeed be okay. The retail side of the Department said “yes” but the wholesale side said “no”. It took a year to get the issue sorted out: it turned out that in LA County, a bakery couldn’t legally do both wholesale and retail in the same location. Mark called bakeries all over California to find out if other counties had the same restrictions. They didn’t. All over the place, bakeries were happily mixing wholesale and retail sales.
What about the bagel stores in LA? Mark drove to the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery. The owner said they had always been selling wholesale and retail and got inspected by the LA County Health Department every year. Mark informed the Health Department who was speechless with surprise at the news. Through sheer single-mindedness, he managed to get through to the upper échelons and, in 2011, the policy was changed. It became legal in LA County to do retail and wholesale in the same bakery.
But people still couldn’t bake bread, pies, cookies, etc. at home and sell them wholesale. It was legal in eighteen states (some states had had such laws for twenty years) but not in California. Mark googled “selling California homemade food”and learned of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), a group of Northern California young lawyers looking to fight whatever regulation was stifling community-building in the state. Mark explained the situation, SELC agreed that a law needed to be written and Mark started looking at how to write laws. Then, late in the summer of 2011, just when it became clear to Mark that he hadn’t a clue how to write and pass a state law, Mike Gatto, his representative in the California state legislature, called out of the blue and asked what he could do to help.
Mark worked with Gatto’s staff and SELC through the rest of 2011 on drafting the text of the law. Then he spent the best part of 2012 lobbying for it in Sacramento and visiting scores of assembly members and state senators (he says he now has a lot of respect for what legislators do). Working with SELC, he started an online petition, got thousands of signatures and managed to generate a lot of publicity and public interest. The Assembly and the Senate approved the bill towards the end of summer and Governor Brown signed it into law on September 21, 2012. It became effective on January 1, 2013. A couple of days later, Mark became the first person in LA County (and possibly in all of California) to be able to sell homemade food legally. The stores and the CSA started carrying his bread again.

Mark sees the legislation as a stepping stone: it gives people who are starting out a way to try their hand at the business. If successful, they can expand and go commercial. Mark himself is thinking of opening a bakery with a wood-fired oven one day. When he does, I hope he’ll invite me to come back down and visit. Bakeries have got to be my favorite stores. There is no headier fragrance that the smell wafting out of freshly baked naturally leavened loaves and few more comforting sounds than the crackling song of cooling bread. Photos and words are sadly inadequate in that respect…

You might think Mark had been busy enough over the past few years, working at his full-time job during the week, baking all weekend, lobbying legislators in Sacramento, gathering signatures and so forth that he had time for nothing else but collapse in bed when he had a chance but you would be wrong! In 2011, together with two friends and fellow bakers who attributed the scarcity of good bread in the LA area to the absence of a baking community in Southern California, he decided to even the playing field by creating the Los Angeles Bread Bakers. By early 2012, the group counted more than 600 members throughout LA County, as well as elsewhere in California.
The members were lamenting the lack of local access to good organic flour and grain: Mark contacted Keith and Nicky Giusto from Central Milling, drove up to Petaluma and filled the trunk of his Honda Civic. Back in LA, he split his bounty with his fellow bakers.
Today LABB members order a couple of pallets at a time a few times a year (thus greatly reducing delivery charges), bulk-order baking equipment such as baskets, lames, whisks, etc., offer classes (oven-building, bread-making, soba-noodle making, tortilla-making, etc.) and lectures and, listen to this, grow grain themselves!
Yes, you read that right, LABB is trying its collective hand at raising different varieties of wheat and spelt in Los Angeles: of course it helps that one of the members has acreage in Agoura Hills and is letting the group farm some of it. I was supposed to go and see the fields on the day of my visit but we were in LA with our oldest granddaughter for her spring break and somehow I didn’t get the feeling that a nineteen-year old college student’s preferred activity for her last day in the city (she was flying back that night) would be a long drive to the hills to watch wheat grow. So we skipped the tour.
Fortunately LABB keeps a blog and I have been following its farming adventures closely, especially the encounters with sheep and friendly pigs and the contest with the ground squirrels who apparently love good grain as passionately as bakers do. Mark visits the fields regularly and was warned by a local farmer against the large, aggressive rattlesnakes who patrol the area on the lookout for human intruders. As he put it in a recent email, “who knew that baking bread could be so hazardous?”

Who indeed? If one excepts the break-in by a big raccoon one night as loaves were cooling in the screened porch at our little cabin by the River, my only baking encounters with wildlife have been with the yeasts which leaven my bread: they may have a mind of their own but they are not threatening.

Mark kindly sent me home with three loaves of bread, the first “real” bread we had had in the week since we had left home. What a treat! With Danielle gone, we couldn’t possibly eat it all, so we took it with us when we drove to Escondido the next day to visit my friend Mimi whose family owns and operates an avocado ranch (which is so beautiful that I’ll share a few photos in another post). Mimi was delighted with the bread (from what she said, I got the feeling that good bread isn’t easy to come by where she lives) and as we were hungry, she set out to create a simple snack.

She sliced some of Mark’s bread, cut open and sliced an avocado, added a few drops of Meyer lemon juice (she had picked the lemon as we visited the ranch), ground some salt and pepper over the whole thing and voilà, she was done. Silence reigned around the table as we chewed, mindful of the harmony in our mouths. I never knew the taste of levain could make an avocado sing… Bravo, Mark, and merci!

Oops!

Ooops, oops, oops! I totally apologize. I never meant to post on Farine about my MRI!! The post was meant for a private blog I have set up to communicate with family and close friends.
I did mean to let Farine readers know that I have been diagnosed with breast cancer but not until we knew exactly what we were dealing with and what the prognosis might tentatively look like. Which should happen in the coming days.
Also I would never have joked about the size of my breasts on an open blog! For me that’s the equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction on network television. I am so mortified! If I had been less in a hurry to get the post out last night before rushing to the kids’ house for 19-month old Lily’s bath time, I would have paid more attention to which blog I was posting to. Meanwhile I can’t help feeling that it is a bit funny! Like being on your way to work and realizing in the subway that you are wearing your old slippers…
Anyway the cat is out of the bag and there is nothing I can do about it now. I have removed the post (which really doesn’t belong on Farine). But I’ll keep you updated, I promise, and meanwhile I am deeply grateful for the messages of love and support you have already sent our way. Thank you!

Of Time and the garden

We went back to the Japanese Garden last week. The sky was grey, an iridescent grey only a painter could think up. Or a poet. The kind of sky that can often be seen glistening over the roofs of Paris, my hometown. We walked the moss-lined paths, taking it all in: the carousing camelias, the budding bushes, the greening grass.

On our last visit summer was ending. Turtles were lined up on narrow reefs, soaking up the weakening sun. Kois were swarming the shores of the pond, gaping mouths held above water, begging for treats before winter’s long slumber. Leaves were turning. Our family was whole.

I wish time could be dialed back. When I was ten or eleven, my older brother -who was reading philosophy at school- explained to me one day that Time didn’t actually exist, that it was a human construct. I was appalled and indignant and to this day, even though I understand the concept intellectually (I read philosophy too when my turn came), I still don’t find it relevant or helpful. For me, life is ALL about Time.

Winter is waning and color slowly infusing the garden again. Time is marching on… If it were reversible, I could accept the idea that we invented it. But it isn’t and transience rules. I didn’t always know that. I remember thinking when I was very young (maybe three or four) that parents were parents and kids were kids and would remain so forever. I was actually happy to belong to the kid category because, for some reason, I knew that it was the parents’ job to pay the bills and that it was sometimes tough. But I learned otherwise soon after: my next Time-related memory is figuring out how long I would have to wait to turn eighteen (that’s how old my mom had said I had to be to start wearing lipstick). Time was slow then.

The garden cycles through the seasons. Our family is held in a wrinkle of Time. Both ineluctably moving forward and irresistibly held back. Grief is our connection to our lost grandson. To the family that once was. There is no going back but there is no letting go either.
We are woven of strands of Time and held together by the ties that bind us. When a knot comes loose, we unravel. My mother grieved for seventy-two years for a baby she carried for nine months and knew for thirty-six hours. He was her first-born. Her last thought was of him.
However much I rebel against the irreversibility of Time, my daughter will never have her little boy back and I know she will grieve for him till she draws her last breath. Hers is a sorrow that will never abate.

The garden remains. A light breeze carries the effluves of spring. In the pond, the turtles are still sluggish but they hold their heads above water like tiny periscopes. The kois swim aimlessly. They can’t start eating until the water warms up and their digestive systems kick into action again. Eating now would kill them and they know it. But fasting is clearly not as much fun as feasting. They look bored. I guess Time can be slow for a fish too.
We circle the pond and wander the paths of the garden. Time marches on. There is no going back to what was. But the sky is suitably grey and the grass stubbornly green. Serenity washes over us like high tide over bruised shores. It comes and goes, forever elusive but still a comfort. Like a mirage in a desert.

(The photos above have been taken on three separate visits, one in April last year, some at the end of August, others last week.)

Learning Loaf (with old dough)

So many of you have written to say you wanted to try your hand at bread but didn’t know where to start that I thought I should post a fairly simple (but still tasty) recipe. There are faster recipes galore, both in books and online, but frankly I am not crazy about them. In my experience (and that of many other bakers) and except in the case of breads that rely on baking soda or powder for leavening, the faster the bread the blander the taste and the shorter the shelf life.
Most simple breads (those who don’t rely for flavor on a bunch of ingredients beyond flour, water, salt, and yeast) turn out tastier, rise better and have a better crumb if they are made over two days instead of being mixed and baked in the space of a few short hours in one single day.
These breads call for a two-step process: a mix of flour, water and yeast (and sometimes salt, as in this recipe) is left to ferment overnight acquiring both depth of flavor and increased leavening power. The day after, this first dough (or preferment) is incorporated into the final dough to which it imparts a distinctive taste and structure depending on its hydration (percentage of water relative to flour), the temperature at which it was kept, the length of its fermentation, the amount of yeast involved, etc.
There are several types of preferments. In this recipe, we will be using what’s commonly called “old dough“. Some bakers prefer to call it by its French name, pâte fermentée (fermented dough) but “old dough” does the trick for me. It is easier to explain to kids and it reminds me of the hours our grandchildren have spent at our kitchen table playing with salt dough. They cut and folded and shaped and had all manners of fun. I used to put a bit of vegetable oil in their salt dough, so that it remained pliable and whatever was left over could be kept in the fridge from one weekend to the next. If I were teaching them to bake bread now, I would explain the difference between salt dough (which is dead) and bread dough which is alive because it contains yeast and therefore requires a bit more tender loving care.
To get your hands on a piece of old dough, either you use some dough left over from another baking session (which almost never happens in my house as I nearly always forget to set dough aside for the next batch), or if you have baked no bread in the past 48 hours (old dough tends to become more acidic and to lose its leavening power if it sits for too long), you simply mix flour, water, salt and a pinch of yeast until the dough starts to develop, put it in a bowl, cover it, let it ferment slowly overnight at cool room temperature and voilà, you have your old dough!
This loaf is the perfect weekend baking project: you mix the old dough on Friday night, mix and bake the final dough on Saturday and enjoy fresh bread from Saturday night on (which is why the amounts are generous enough to yield two loaves). You may not succeed right away: we ate our share of doorstops over the years but learning is always a process, isn’t it? So don’t despair if it doesn’t turn out exactly the way you want the first time. Plus unless your bread is hopelessly burnt or you forgot the yeast and it baked into a flat stone or you forgot the flour (which happened to me once when I was a child and made a French almond cake for my family. It tasted awfully of canned mushroom – I still can’t figure out why – and my doting father is the only one who got a second helping and said it was really good in an interesting way – although decades later he still laughed like a hyena when he told the story) and there was no dough to bake, it will always be appreciably better than supermarket bread…

To make this recipe,

You will need

A large bowl and two medium-size bowls as well as lids or plastic film to keep them covered
A spatula to scrape the bowls
A scale (preferably electronic, so that you can switch easily from ounces to grams)
A dough cutter (or a knife with a wide blade) to divide the dough prior to shaping it
A clear plastic bag large enough to house the proofing shaped loaf without touching it
A razor blade or a serrated knife (to slash the loaf before baking)
An oven
A pelle or rimless baking sheet to slide the loaves into the oven and get them out when they are baked
Parchment paper

You might find it convenient to have as well

(Please note that the links are meant to give you an idea of what the equipment looks like and that I am recommending no specific brand or seller)

A instant-read thermometer
A plastic proofing container with a lid
A round proofing basket (or else a round colander lined with a flour sack or other non-stick towel)
A board and a linen (or other non-stick fabric) towel to proof your shaped loaves (the ones which don’t proof in a basket)
A baking stone (before I had one, I used a rimless metal sheet pan which always stayed in the oven and got preheated when I turned the oven on)
Some kind of steaming device (I use an old metal dripping pan filled with smooth lava stones which I always leave on the oven bottom shelf)

My oven setup

Bread Tips

Time can also do a big share of the work for you. My hands and wrists are giving me all kinds of trouble but even though I own two different types of mixers and unless I am baking for a big crowd, I still prefer to mix my doughs by hand. My favorite method is to just incorporate the ingredients (making sure all the flour is hydrated) and then leave the (still very shaggy) dough to rest, covered, for 10 minutes. When I come back, lo and behold, the gluten has developed appreciably. I give the dough a few gentle stretches and folds inside the bowl (the in-bowl mixing method is helpfully illustrated here by Khalid on The Fresh Loaf ), cover it again, and come back again 10 minutes later to do the same. After four or five times, the dough is usually ready for bulk fermentation.
Temperature matters. Most bakeries are much warmer inside than the average home, at least at our latitudes during the cold months of the year. Depending on the season, the same exact dough may give you different results. The taste may vary (the bacteria which develop in cooler temperature are not identical to those which develop at warmer temperature) and so may the bread structure (in my experience, it is often easier to get a more open crumb with a yeast-leavened dough that has fermented in a warmer environment).
There are ways to keep your dough snug (setting it to rise in the oven with a light or the pilot light on or near a source of heat such as a fireplace or using a makeshift proofer made of a seedling mat and an inverted plastic box, etc.). I have a folding bread proofer but I haven’t used it for this recipe as I wanted to reproduce as closely as possible the conditions which might exist in your home if, like me, you have to reckon with the tail end of winter in the Northern United States.
Everything being otherwise equal, I find that an indoor temperature of about 76°/24° is about ideal. But good luck on getting that temperature consistently throughout the year! The little laundry room where I do my mixing and baking is hot in the summer (85-90°F/29°-32°C) and cool in the winter (59-62°F/15-16°C). On very warm days, I set the dough to ferment -well covered- on the floor of the garage and on very cold ones, on the countertop next to the washer on the side opposite to the window, where temperature is a couple of degrees warmer. I have learned to enjoy the slow fermentations of winter (which give me a lot of time to do other things) as well as the bouncy eagerness of summer doughs (which sometimes require to be tempered in the fridge as a quickly risen dough seldom yields satisfactory results).
Of course when a dough needs to be slowly fermented over a long period of time (as is often the case for doughs leavened with a natural starter instead of commercial yeast), it can only be kept at cozy room temperature if the process is strictly controlled and watched over (as it is for instance by Gérard Rubaud in his Vermont bakery). For the home baker who enjoys sleeping through the night, the only solution is often to find a really cool place (sometimes the fridge) to let the dough rise slowly overnight.
It is considered optimal for a dough to have an internal temperature of about 76-78°/24°-26°C at the end of the mixing. One way to achieve this is to modulate the temperature of the water you add to the flour at the time of the mixing, using warmer water when the room and the ingredients are cold and colder water when they are warm. For this loaf, I used warmish water from the tap. I didn’t measure the temperature but made sure it was one step above lukewarm. Never use hot water as it would kill the yeast. For a very helpful and detailed description of the way to obtain a specific desired dough temperature (DDT), please refer to this page of Susan’s Wild Yeast blog (a blog I most fervently recommend to anyone who is interested in becoming a serious home baker);
The amount of water you use makes a big difference in the type of bread you end up with and it is nearly impossible for any recipe to give you an exact indication of the hydration rate. There are too many variables, the first of which is the flour you are using which is most probably not from the same brand and the same batch as the ones used to make the featured recipe. Even if you are used to working with one specific brand and one type of flour, you will find that you may need to increase or decrease water with each new batch. Which means that you need to develop a feel for the dough consistency that gives you the best results. That may be the toughest part of learning to be a baker but it is also the most rewarding because one day you’ll just know and you will never forget (a bit like riding a bike).
A good rule of thumb is to reserve at the start about 10% to 15% of the total water amount indicated in the recipe in order to add it later on in the mixing process as/if needed. You may end up not using it or you may have to add even more. It will be for you to determine but once you know, it is useful to make a note of it for the following time. I often find I have to use more water than indicated in a recipe;
Which brings me to this: keep a log book. If you intend to start baking regularly, for each bread you make, write down which recipe you used, what was the room temperature, how much water you ended up using, how long you preheated the oven, how long you baked the loaf and at what temperature(s), how open or dense the crumb was, whether or not you liked the bread, how was the flavor, what you would like to change if anything, etc. Take pictures of the bread and of its crumb and save them. Your log book will quickly become a reference tool which will save you time and effort down the road.

Ingredients (for one boule and one curlicue)

Old dough

210 g all-purpose flour, unbleached
137 g water
4 g salt
A scant pinch of instant yeast

OR:

A 350 g piece of dough saved from a previous mix

Final dough

631 g all-purpose flour, unbleached
70 g wholegrain rye flour (also called dark rye flour) (I use rye because I like the flavor and the slightly darker color it imparts to the bread. I also like the tiny specks of rye bran in the crumb)
484 g water
14 g salt
A pinch of instant yeast
All of the old dough (about 350 g)

Method

Old dough (to be made the evening before)

Whisk all the dry ingredients together in the medium size bowl, add water and mix by hand until the flour is well hydrated and incorporated
Let rest 10 minutes, covered
Leaving the dough in the bowl, pull it on one side and fold it towards the center, turn the bowl slightly and repeat, repeat until you are back where you started. Cover the bowl again and let the dough rest
Repeat four or five times
Let ferment, tightly covered (I use plastic film) until morning at room temperature (if room temperature is cool). If room temperature is warm, let it ferment about four hours, then put it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, take it out of the fridge and leave it at room temperature for one or two hours before mixing

Old dough in the evening

Old dough the following morning

Final dough (to be mixed on the day of the bake)

The old dough should have inflated a bit and smell slightly fermented
Divide it in several little chunks for easier incorporation with the other ingredients
Pour most of the water (set aside 10 to 15%) into the large bowl
Whisk together the flours, yeast and salt in a medium-sized bowl and add them to the large bowl
Add the chunks of old dough

Mix until incorporated. You shouldn’t see any dry flour. If you do, add some of the reserved water. If you still do afterwards, add more water from the tap by very small increments (matching the temperature of the water you previously used)
The dough will be shaggy but pliable. Cover it and let it rest 10 minutes

Leaving the dough in the bowl, pull it on one side until it is stretched and fold it towards the center, turn the bowl slightly and repeat, repeat until you are back where you started. Cover the bowl again and let rest

Repeat four or five times at 10 minutes interval. Each time you come back to the dough, it should have changed, become smoother, shinier and easier to handle

Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled proofing container and cover tightly
After 20 minutes, fold the dough inside the bowl (see this useful video by Amy at 0:26 to 0:46 min. Amy from Amy’s Bread is a wonderful New York City baker whom I had the pleasure to meet last year at WheatStalk. Her Italian dough is much wetter and softer than our Learning Loaf dough but the folding method is still the same )
Repeat twice at 20 minute-intervals
Let rise as long as needed for the dough to show a dent that doesn’t bounce back right away when you palpate it with your fingertips
Transfer the dough to a floured tabletop and pat it gently into a rectangle
Using the dough cutter or a knife with a wide blade, cut the dough in two pieces, roughly two-thirds, one third (you could weigh each piece of dough and make it scientific but you don’t really need to). (Alternatively if you’d like to make two identical boules, cut the dough in half instead)

Loosely pre-shape the big chunk of dough into a boule and let it rest, covered, on the floured counter
Do the same with the smaller piece, except that you flatten it a bit, then roll it loosely into a sausage. Let it rest next to the boule
After 10 minutes or so, the dough will probably have relaxed enough for you to proceed with the shaping: please refer to Amy’s video at 2:45 min to learn how to shape a boule, at 3:28 min to learn how to shape a batard (elongated bread) you can curve into a curlicue if desired or leave as is
Place the shaped boule inside a floured proofing basket such as this one or a round colander lined with a flour sack towel (I suppose a towel-lined bowl might do in a pinch but from what I read it is better for the dough to be able to breathe on all sides as it rises) or just set it on a flour-dusted parchment paper-lined board (if not contained the loaf might expand a bit laterally and don’t give you as much of a rise: it will still taste fine though)

Place the shaped curlicue on the same board (about 4 or 5 inches away from the free-rising boule if not using the basket) and slip the whole thing inside a large clear plastic bag
Tie the bag closed making sure to trap enough air in it for the plastic not to touch the dough
Let the boule and the curlicue proof until doubled in size (at cool room temperature it may take 45 minutes to one hour)
Meanwhile pre-heat the oven to 475°F/246°C with both the baking stone (or rimless metal half-sheet pan) and the metal pan inside, the stone or sheet pan on the middle shelf and the dripping pan (for steaming) on the bottom one
When the loaves have doubled in size, take them out of the plastic bag, gently invert the boule on a parchment paper-lined rimless sheet pan, dust it with flour (I use a fine mesh shaker) and holding the razor blade or the serrated knife at a slight angle, slash it a few times on top (for this boule, I slashed the dough four times in a fan pattern)
(If you have room enough for the curlicue to bake in the oven at the same time as the boule, transfer it to the sheet pan, dust it with flour as well and slash it a few times. If your oven isn’t large enough (mine isn’t), tie the bag closed again with the curlicue inside and set it to wait in a cool place
Quickly transfer the boule into the oven by sliding it off the sheet pan and onto the preheated stone (it stays on the parchment paper)
Pour one cupful of warm water onto the lava stones (watch out as a lot of steam will suddenly shoot up) and close the oven door quickly
After five minutes, turn the oven down to 450°F/232°C and let the bread bake for about 35 more minutes
When ready it will sound hollow when tapped on the bottom
Repeat with the curlicue (except that it will bake a bit quicker, maybe 30 to 35 minutes total)
I find it useful to turn the oven light on and check on the breads as they bake. If I see they are turning a bit dark, I tent them with aluminum foil (taking care that the foil doesn’t touch the bread). You may also need at this point to slightly lower the temperature of your oven. Ovens are like flours: they are all different. My 450° may be you 430° or vice-versa.
Once the bread is baked, set it to cool on a wire rack and wait for it to have cooled completely to slice it open
Enjoy!

The Learning Loaf is going to Susan’s for the next issue of Yeastspotting.

Back to Baking

Yesterday was my first real Back to Baking Day since mid-December. Two and a half months without living dough in my hands. Too long…
But I had a hard time getting in the mood: it took four weeks from the day we came home for me to feel the urge. Of course we had a bread-packed freezer to begin with; local baking friends kept us supplied with marvelous homemade loaves; our Pacific Northwest Trader Joe’s carries bread that is quite good (you wouldn’t think it likely when you wander the aisles of most Trader Joe’s stores I know in the Northeast, where bread is of the barely acceptable variety but yes, grocery chains do adapt to their markets and apparently here in the urban Northwest people are serious about their bread); and finally I still find it difficult to focus. No matter how hard I try, my mind wanders. Combined, all these reasons were good enough for me not to dive into the flour bin right away.
What helped me get my baking groove back is probably the BBGA flatbread class I attended last weekend with a Canadian friend. It was taught by Leslie Mackie of Macrina Bakery in Seattle. I’ll write more about it in another post (as soon as I have made one of the flatbreads at home). For now I’ll just say that it was excellent and a lot of fun to boot and that I simply love being around bakers. They are among my favorite people!
So the class helped. Plus the fact that I am trying to develop a simple learning loaf in response to the many requests I got from readers who happened on Farine because of our grandson, had never visited a bread blog before, are now tempted to give bread-baking a shot and wonder where and how to start. I have been mulling the idea for a while and I decided yesterday was as good an opportunity as any to experiment with a basic -yet tasty- recipe (I’ll post about that first learning loaf some time next week).
Finally we have a friend from France coming to stay with us for a while. She lives outside Paris in a dreamy yellow house with Van Gogh-blue shutters and when I go stay with her, we only have to walk three minutes to get our daily baguette from the little bakery around the corner. Since we can’t do that here, I must have bread for her. A three-second walk to the freezer in the garage might be slightly less romantic but hey, to her it might be just as amazing. Her French freezer is so tiny it could fit in my American bread box!
So yesterday I baked three different kinds of bread: the two loaves in the foreground are chocolate and currant levain (my French friend will forgive me for revealing here that she is a huge chocolate fan); the big boule in the middle is the learning loaf (I don’t know yet how else to call it); the curlicue on top was made with leftover dough from the learning loaf; and the four short batards (or rustic baguettes) on the sides are levain-based and partly wholegrain (wheat, spelt and rye).
For those of you who are new to baking and might be puzzled by the French word levain, let me say that it is usually translated by “sourdough”. I don’t like to use that word though because it puts too much emphasis on sourness. A levain (also called “starter”, a word I like much better than “sourdough”) is always characterized by some level of acidity (and, from what I understand, acidity is actually good because it helps make available to our body some of the nutrients otherwise locked in the grain) but the baker can control that acidity by playing with variables such as time and temperature and my personal preference goes to less sour. The learning loaf seen above is not made with levain (which wouldn’t be readily available to most Farine readers) but with a pre-ferment calling for yeast commonly found in grocery stores across America (more on the subject next week).
Our grandson loved bread (all our grandchildren do) and he was very interested in the hand-mixing process. He listened attentively when I spoke of the interaction of flour, water, salt and starter (he especially loved the idea that invisible micro-organisms are present in the flour and ready to spring to life and make dough rise). I remember hoping that one day he and his sisters might be motivated enough to want to learn how to bake for themselves.
So I thought of him a lot yesterday. Of course nothing can replace a little boy sitting on the kitchen counter, banging his feet against the cabinet and devouring slice after slice of freshly baked bread but still it brought me some degree of comfort to know that at least in spirit and in my heart he was definitely present. And maybe, just maybe, he is the one who inspired me to taste the baguette dough before setting it to rise. Good thing I did: I had forgotten the salt!

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